Update | By Trisha Marczak
Daniel Chong filed a $20 million lawsuit against the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Wednesday, citing psychosis suffering after being forgotten in a jail cell for four days. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports the DEA issued an apology Wednesday.
“I am deeply troubled by the incident that occurred here last week,” DEA special agent William R. Sherman said in a statement. “I extend my deepest apologies to the young man and want to express that this event is not indicative of the high standards that I hold my employees to. I have personally ordered an extensive review of our policies and procedures.”
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has said it will review the case.
(MintPress)– “I had to do what I had to do to survive,” said Daniel Chong. Locked in a cell for days and forgotten by federal drug agents, the American college student drank his own urine to survive.
Chong, a 24-year-old engineering student at the University of California, San Diego was taken into custody along with nine suspects and others on April 21.
He was at a party at a friend’s house in University City celebrating 4/20, a day which many marijuana users set aside to smoke the substance. Agents raided the residence, which turned up marijuana, ecstasy pills, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and three guns.
No criminal charges were filed against Chong, but he was locked up in a cell without food or water for five days.
Innocent until proven guilty?
Chong has told media that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) who detained him told him he would be let go, and they promised him a ride home from the DEA field office in Kearny Mesa. Chong was then taken to the DEA office in Kearny Mesa and put in a small cell.
Chong says he kicked the door “many, many times” and screamed for agents to remove him from the five-by-10-foot windowless cell, where he could hear DEA workers and other detainees walking around and talking outside.
“They never came back, ignored all my cries and I still don’t know what happened. I’m not sure how they could forget me,” he told NBC San Diego.
He was accidentally left in the cell without food or water for five days, DEA spokeswoman Amy Roderick confirmed.
“I hallucinated by the third day,” Chong said. “I was completely insane.”
Also left in the cell with Chong was a white powder, wrapped up inside a blanket, later identified as methamphetamine. It did not belong to Chong. According to his attorney, Chong ingested it because he was starving.
“I didn’t care if I died,” Chong said.
Dehydrated and starving, Chong broke his eye glasses with his teeth and tried to commit suicide by cutting into his arm with a piece of broken glass.
Chong said he tried to carve “sorry Mom” into his flesh with the shard of broken glass, “but I couldn’t even aim so I just gave up,” he said.
US prison system known for abuses
The prison system in the U.S. has been under investigation and criticism for some time. Human Rights Watch condemned the United States on a broad range of civil liberties abuses.
In particular, the human rights group, in a report published in 2011, said the country’s prison system is an institution which serves to “mar” the country’s human right record.
The report, which followed the first-ever Universal Periodic Review of the U.S. at the United Nations Human Rights Council in November 2010, part of a larger process where the council examined the human rights records of all 192 UN member countries.
Human Rights Watch concluded in the report of the human rights record in the United States: “Although the Obama administration has pledged to address many of these concerns, progress has been slow; in some areas it has been nonexistent.”
The report found that the United States had the largest prison population in the world, both in numbers and as a percentage of population. As of June 2009, 2,297,400 people were incarcerated in the U.S., a rate of 748 inmates per 100,000 residents.
In addition, the report highlighted the fact that harsh prison conditions were exposed in July 2010 when the European Court of Human Rights temporarily halted the extradition of four terrorism suspects from the United Kingdom to the U.S. due to concerns that their long-term incarceration in a U.S. “supermax” prison would violate Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits “torture or… inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”