‘Barbarism’: Texas judge ordered electric shocks to silence man on trial. Conviction thrown out.
In Tarrant County, Tex., defendants are sometimes strapped with a stun belt around their legs. The devices are used to deliver a shock in the event the person gets violent or attempts to escape.
But in the case of Terry Lee Morris, the device was used as punishment for refusing to answer a judge’s questions properly during his 2014 trial on charges of soliciting sexual performance from a 15-year-old girl, according to an appeals court. In fact, the judge shocked Morris three times, sending thousands of volts coursing through his body. It scared him so much that Morris never returned for the remainder of his trial and almost all of his sentencing hearing.
The action stunned the Texas Eighth Court of Appeals in El Paso, too. And it has now thrown out Morris’s conviction on the grounds that the shocks, and Morris’s subsequent removal from the courtroom, violated his constitutional rights. Since he was too scared to come back to the courtroom, the court held that the shocks effectively barred him from attending his own trial, in violation of the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment, which guarantees a defendant’s right to be present and confront witnesses during a trial.
The ruling, handed down Feb. 28, was reported Tuesday in the Texas Lawyer.
Judges are not allowed to shock defendants in their courtrooms just because they won’t answer questions, the court said, or because they fail to follow the court’s rules of decorum.
“While the trial court’s frustration with an obstreperous defendant is understandable, the judge’s disproportionate response is not. We do not believe that trial judges can use stun belts to enforce decorum,”
Justice Yvonne T. Rodriguez said of Gallagher’s actions in the court’s opinion. “A stun belt is a device meant to ensure physical safety; it is not an operant conditioning collar meant to punish a defendant until he obeys a judge’s whim. This Court cannot sit idly by and say nothing when a judge turns a court of law into a Skinner Box, electrocuting a defendant until he provides the judge with behavior he likes.”
The stun belt works in some ways like a shock collar used to train dogs. Activated by a button on a remote control, the stun belt delivers an eight-second, 50,000-volt shock to the person wearing it, which immobilizes him so that bailiffs can swiftly neutralize any security threats. When activated, the stun belt can cause the person to seize, suffer heart irregularities, urinate or defecate and suffer possibly crippling anxiety as a result of fear of the shocks.
The stun belt can also be very painful. When Montgomery County, Md., purchased three of the devices in 1998, a sheriff’s sergeant who was jolted as part of his training described the feeling to The Washington Post like this: “If you had nine-inch nails and you tried to rip my sides out and then you put a heat lamp on me.”
Most courts have found that the stun belts are constitutional as long as they are used on defendants posing legitimate security threats — but the Texas justices said there was no evidence of that here.
The discord between Morris and Gallagher arose after Gallagher asked Morris how he would plead: guilty or not guilty?
“Sir, before I say that, I have the right to make a defense,” Morris responded.
He had recently filed a federal lawsuit against his defense attorney and against Gallagher, whom he wanted recused from the case. As Morris continued talking, Gallagher warned him to stop making “outbursts.”
“Mr. Morris, I am giving you one warning,” Gallagher said outside the presence of the jury, according to the appeals court. “You will not make any additional outbursts like that, because two things will happen.
No. 1, I will either remove you from the courtroom or I will use the shock belt on you.”
“All right, sir,” Morris said.
The judge continued: “Now, are you going to follow the rules?”
“Sir, I’ve asked you to recuse yourself,” said Morris.
Gallagher asked again: “Are you going to follow the rules?”
“I have a lawsuit pending against you,” responded Morris.
“Hit him,” Gallagher said to the bailiff.
The bailiff pressed the button that shocks Morris, and then Gallagher asked him again whether he is going to behave. Morris told Gallagher he had a history of mental illness.
“Hit him again,” the judge ordered.
Morris protested that he was being “tortured” just for seeking the recusal.
Gallagher asked the bailiff, “Would you hit him again?”
Morris’s trial defense attorney, Bill Ray, told Texas Lawyer he didn’t object to use of stun belt during trial because his client was acting “like a loaded cannon ready to go off.” He also claimed he did not believe Morris was really being shocked.
As the Texas justices note, case law on the use of stun belts on defendants in court is slim, if only because outrageous uses of stun belts in courts are rare.
In the several cases cited in the ruling, the stun belts’ damaging effects on a person as well as their controversial history are well recognized. The stun belts were introduced in the early 1990s as a way to “control” prisoners. And according to testimony in a stun belt case from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, the devices “acted more as a deterrent rather than a means of actual punishment because of the tremendous amount of anxiety that results from wearing a belt that packs a 50,000-volt to 70,000-volt punch.”
“Never before have we seen any behavior like this, nor do we hope to ever see such behavior again,” Rodriguez wrote of Gallagher’s actions. “
As the circumstances of this case perfectly illustrate, the potential for abuse in the absence of an explicit prohibition on non-security use of stun belts exists and must be deterred. We must speak out against it, lest we allow practices like these to affront the very dignity of the proceedings we seek to protect and lead our courts to drift from justice into barbarism.”
The judge, contacted by The Post, declined to comment, citing judicial ethics.
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This judge needs to be removed from the bench and charged with torture. There is no defense for this behavior, especially from a judge who is intimately familiar with the law.
I think the lack of response here to this glaring injustice, is an indication that the citizenry is just a frog in a slowly heating pot.
Let's put the belt on the judge and then ask a few of the people this asshole has ridden roughshod over just to ask him if he is going to follow their rules! Better yet, just give me the button. I don't know this judge, but I have met some people from Texas who deserve some shit like this just for being general all around assholes and I don't mind taking it out on him because of them. They are just one of those states where it's all fair and it's all good.
Besides look at the guy! Doesn't he look like he is more deserving of a cattle-prod up the ass?
When I was young, I had a friend who's dad was a super strict, overbearing asshole who everyone hated. We moved away, and they ended up moving to a house out in the country. The house was surrounded by a cattle field with an electrified fence. To 'teach' his son the dangers of electricity, the asshole dad made his son touch the live wire. This is clearly abusive, but nothing compared to the abuse my whole family had witnessed from him on multiple occasions. (Back then abusing your kids was a much less dicey topic.) Anyway, one day the dad had turned off the electric fence to do some repairs. His son took that opportunity to get some payback, and watched while he threw the switch as his dad was holding the wire. It shocked the shit out of his asshole dad, but that was nothing compared to the ass beating that he received for it.
Sadly, that friend passed away a couple years ago from an accidental overdose of pain meds. The really sad part is that it was not even his doing. He had back surgery, and the pharmacy had messed up the dosage on the instructions on the bottle, which specified a dose that would put anyone to sleep forever. He took the pills before bed, and that's exactly what happened. Meanwhile his abusive father is still alive, decades after his mom finally got wise and divorced him, and remarried to a wonderful guy. Such a sad story though.
I'd have no problem with them using the shock collar on this pedophile AFTER he's convicted of molesting a child, but to do it before he's convicted in response to the suspects defense is beyond wrong.
He was convicted of the crime in 2014.
Article says the conviction was thrown out. Plus this occurred during court proceeding before the conviction.
I have to agree with Dismayed Patriot, after found guilty put it on him, and leave it turned on. However using before the conviction is inhuman.
You are absolutely right.
Note to self: Take a remedial reading class as soon as possible.
As much as I despise any crime of child abuse, we cannot let our emotions run roughshod over the 8th Amendments prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. We need to take the high moral road and not seek revenge.
We take our punishment seriously here, especially when it comes to registered sex offenders.
Terry Lee Morris...
...yeah, this guy...has already spent 12 years in prison for causing grievous bodily injury to another child that didn't want to go with him into the woods or where-ever.
BTW, the 15-year-old in this recent case was his girlfriend's daughter, whom he had repeatedly tried to molest. That's how guys like this roll. They become all snuggly with single ladies who have children...
One more point of interest: Police tasers have 50,000 volts and will put an asshole like this on the ground. #don't tase me, Bro! This stun belt wasn't even working, which is why Mr. Morris was able to just sit there, giving the judge a defiant stink-eye. In any event, I'm guessing the parents of his victim wish it had been working.
I don't think anyone is arguing about a child molester being a scumbag. It's the precedent that a judge could feel that they have the authority to deliver electric shocks to defendants at their whimsy. I'm sure we would all love to do that ourselves to this scumbag, but then I also wouldn't mind having the authority to fire some of my coworkers, make a cop pay for my speeding ticket, and give Donald Trump an instant migraine though mind control. That's just not the way the world works ... not an orderly one anyways.
Personally I'd love to give Trump a stroke through mind control, but still....
Perfect example of why Judges shouldn't be elected just because they choose to want to be a Judge.
In a similar vein:
A sheriff's deputy had his ex-wife arrested because he didn't like what she wrote about him on Facebook
The whole thing began in January 2015, when Anne King posted a short Facebook status expressing frustration that her ex, Corey King, refused to drop off some medication for their children on his way to work.
"That moment when everyone in your house has the flu and you ask your kid's dad to get them (not me) more Motrin and Tylenol and he refuses," she wrote, adding an "overwhelmed" face to the post.
Some of her friends chimed in, including Susan Hines, who referred to Corey King as a "POS," saying, "Give me an hour and check your mailbox. I'll be GLAD to pick up the slack."
According to a lawsuit filed on behalf of Anne King, her ex-husband told her to take the post down. When she initially refused, he posted a screenshot on his own Facebook account.
The ex-husband then filed an incident report and, according to his own admission, requested an arrest warrant because of her "derogatory statements."
The arrest warrant, as noted in the complaint, said: The "subject did, without a privilege to do so and with intent to defame another, communicate false matter which tends to expose one who is alive to hatred, contempt, or ridicule, and which tends to provoke a breach of peace."
The next day, a Washington County court magistrate issued warrants for both Anne King and Hines.
...
At their hearing, state-court judge stated there was no basis for the arrest and the case was dropped.
"I don't even know why we're here," the judge said, according to the complaint.