TCI death: 12 years and still no answer Case sparked statewide reform in use of force against prison inmates

By ED RUNYAN
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
LEAVITTSBURG -- Lots of people investigated the 1995 death of inmate Marvin Lane at Trumbull Correctional Institution -- alone in a cell, moments after an intense fight with seven guards.
Today, some people still question what killed him:
What role did excessive force from guards play?
Why was he restrained using a procedure -- hog-tying -- that is neither trained nor advised by state officials? How did TCI's warden at that time not know about the prevalent use of this procedure?
Why were incident reports filled out by staff members so lacking in details? Did the probe fall victim to guards' code of silence?
Why were inmate statements so perfectly in sync -- as if read from a script?
Why were no charges and no discipline brought against guards under whose supervision Lane died?
The situation did lead to a change in all Ohio prisons -- specifically banning hog-tying as a use of force against inmates. It also led to a blistering report on the prison and the guards from one of their own in state operations.
That rule change is about the only indication that Lane's death produced much of a reaction. His family has been unreachable, and there's no evidence that anyone on his behalf sought wrongful-death charges against the state.
The situation, however, lingers for staff members who know about Lane's death -- many of whom feel the truth has never been told.
No prosecution
One is Harry C. Turner III, who was a corrections officer at TCI and a union steward in 1995 when Lane died.
Turner, now an administrative assistant at Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown, said he is certain that the staff members who were present in a sergeant's office in the prison's psychiatric housing unit didn't tell him or investigators everything that happened.
"In some of the [union] representations I made, I could tell that they weren't being honest and forthright, so right away I kinda knew something was wrong, but I still had an obligation to represent them," he said. Turner said he asked the staff members to be truthful with him so he could best represent them in any matters that might arise from Lane's death.
"Did I know they were lying? They didn't come right out and tell me they were lying, but I kind of knew they were," he said.
Turner said he doesn't know whether staff members who secured Lane with two sets of handcuffs -- after Lane attacked a sergeant -- used too much force, or did anything illegal. But he thinks an indictment could have been obtained and a possible prosecution.
"I think that a jury is going to look at the nonspecific statements, the lack of ability of a dozen employees who don't want to make a stand or a statement about something and come to a conclusion that there's more to this case than meets the eye," Turner said.
"I think that a jury of 12 people could discern enough that there might be a conspiracy of silence or that this whole case isn't aboveboard, that when you have 12, 13, 14 different employees who are noncommittal in their statements and as a result an inmate dies, I think a jury could see through that and possibly ferret out that the inmate met his demise at the hands of an employee who was never charged," he said.
Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins said recently that he didn't remember the Lane death specifically, but generally his office will decline to take a case to a grand jury if there is insufficient evidence of a crime.
Statewide impact
Official reports of the case agree that Lane got into a fight with a sergeant in the sergeant's office and tried to strangle the officer by wrapping his handcuffed wrists around his neck.
Six guards heard the commotion and pounced on Lane. It took around 10 minutes, but Lane was finally secured with handcuffs around his hands and feet.
Just before removing Lane from the office to a cell, guards hog-tied him -- securing his hands and feet together behind his back. After only a few minutes in the cell, someone checked on Lane and found that he was not moving.
He was pronounced dead at a Warren hospital a short time later.
What is certain is that his death led to a statewide prison policy change regarding the practice of hog-tying.
Further, the state prison system's chief inspector at the time said hog-tying should never have been allowed in the first place.
Public wasn't told
Though Lane, 37, of Dayton, died at the prison in 1995, the public was never made aware that state prison officials were concerned enough about the circumstances surrounding his death to conduct an in-depth investigation. The findings of the panel -- many of them critical of prison procedures -- were also never released.
The report was recently obtained by The Vindicator.
Investigations were done by the Summit County coroner, Ohio State Highway Patrol and Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections. The coroner initially ruled Lane's death as natural, the result of a heart attack.
More than nine months later -- after the agencies completed their probes and the coroner changed his ruling on the death to "undetermined" -- the county prosecutor concluded that he would not pursue charges against anyone.
Along the way, though, investigators from the ODRC had a lot of questions.
Why hog-tie him?
The state's chief prison inspector at the time, Nick Menedis, said one of the first things he and other team members wanted to know was why was Lane hog-tied even though the method is not part of any written prison procedure.
It was being done at TCI and elsewhere, Menedis learned.
But the law enforcement and prison community was just then learning that the procedure could be fatal, Menedis said. It can lead to a fatal condition called positional asxphyxia -- when a person suffocates from being placed on his stomach and hog-tied.
By the end of the investigation, Menedis and his team concluded that prison employees' actions were "reasonable," given their lack of knowledge that hog-tying could be fatal.
Menedis, ODRC chief inspector from 1994-97, said he notified the ODRC's Central Office when it became clear that hog-tying was a factor in Lane's death and the practice was immediately stopped in the prison system statewide.
Menedis said investigators wanted to know when the practice began.
The Corrections Training Academy, which trains the state's corrections officers, told team members that hog-tying had never been taught there. But the technique had been demonstrated during self-defense training classes taught by an Ohio police agency around 1992 and 1993, investigators learned.
"It is now a prohibited practice," officials wrote. "It should never have been a practice in our institutions, but the explanation as to how it was introduced should teach us a lesson in being more careful," the team wrote.
Further, the team wrote that it found it hard to believe that hog-tying was such a common practice at the prison but the warden at the time, James Schotten, claimed to not know it was being done. There is no reasonable excuse for the administration's supposed "not knowing" about the hog-tying at TCI, the report said.
Details were lacking
The team was concerned about whether the employees had given a full accounting of what happened -- a concern that Menedis carries with him to this day.
The team said incident reports staff members wrote right after the death were "poor at best," containing many omissions. Follow-up interviews were done by Menedis' team -- as well as the state highway patrol in a separate investigation -- to flesh out the details.
"The omissions of important facts that would normally be sought by interested parties are glaring," the report said. It added that in the future, prison officials might need to remind employees that failing to complete such reports properly "can be construed as interfering with an investigation."
Menedis said failure of prison staff members to be forthcoming with information was a problem he encountered elsewhere in the state's prison system as well.
"Sometimes guards would adopt a code of silence," Menedis said. "It frustrated me to see that did happen."
More serious problem
The lead investigator handling Lane's death for the state patrol, however, said recently that the more serious problem during the Lane investigation was information from inmates.
Trooper Richard Baron was the lead investigator for the OSHP. Baron interviewed dozens of prison staff and inmates, and said in a recent interview that he discovered that many of the inmates were telling identical stories about what they saw.
Baron said he believed that inmate statements were "rehearsed."
More important, Baron said, is that the physical evidence supported the statements of the guards. For example, Lane suffered no significant injuries associated with kicking, he said, even though some inmates claimed to see a guard kicking at Lane.
Vomit found in the cell where Lane was found unresponsive is an indication that he died there -- not in the office with the guards. Some inmates claimed Lane appeared to be dead before he left the sergeant's office.
"One thing that will never lie to you is the crime scene," Baron said.
Change of ruling
One day after Lane's death, William A. Cox, Summit County coroner who investigated the case for Trumbull County, called Lane's death "natural," the result of a heart attack. He found evidence that Lane had suffered an earlier heart attack and that he suffered from cardiovascular disease.
Dr. Cox changed the manner of death to "undetermined" in July 1996 after reviewing the investigation by the ODRC team. Cox's report doesn't say what part of the state's report caused him to change his cause of death, though it suggests he was initially unaware that Lane had been hog-tied.
The Trumbull Correctional Institute has had three homicides since it opened in 1992. The first was Dennis Yacyszyn in June 1995, killed by his cell mate who was later convicted of murder. The second was Daniel R. Williams, who died of a heroin overdose in April 1997; an inmate was convicted of his manslaughter. Third was Major Lee, who died in July 2005; his cell mate's actions were deemed self-defense.
All other deaths at the prison since that time were ruled accidental or natural, mostly due to heart ailments. Lane's is the only death at the prison since it opened in 1992 ruled "undetermined."
Why it was changed
Dr. Cox said "in light of the information gathered during the investigation process," he changed the death ruling to "undetermined" and said Lane died from "hypoxic [lack of oxygen] and cardiac [heart] arrest following altercation with corrections officers after hog-tying."
Cox now works for the Franklin County coroner's office. An employee there said he was not willing to discuss any cases from outside Franklin County.
Cox noted in the later report it has been "clearly demonstrated that a person lying on his stomach has difficulty breathing" and that the risk of suffocation is compounded "when physical restraint includes the use of behind-the-back handcuffing combined with placing the subject in a stomach-down position."
Cox said it took between 10 and 12 minutes to restrain Lane and that the stress on his heart from his struggle, his heart disease and being placed on his stomach and hog-tied and with pressure applied to his back and back of his neck were all contributory factors to his death.
Cox noted that, in the course of attempting to restrain inmate Lane, one staff member "had his knee on the back of Mr. Lane's neck."
"It is not feasible to quantitate scientifically which of these factors played a more substantial role in his subsequent demise," Dr. Cox wrote.
runyan@vindy.com